Free The Romeo and Juliet Code by Phoebe Stone Page A

quickly. I always was good at thinking of something pleasant or odd, like the way the guards outside of Buckingham Palace never smiled or spoke. They always looked straight ahead as if they were statues, even if you jumped up and down in front of them or touched their hand or asked them where to find the Tower of London.
    I squeezed my eyes tight now and hoped something cheeky would come to me in a bright moment. Then I opened them and looked up at Derek. He seemed so tall and clever sitting there with all his code-breaking ideas on paper in front of him.
    “Anyway, it doesn’t matter about anything. What matters is this,” he said and he flung his one useless arm up high. It dropped heavily back to his lap. “I can’t help my country and I can’t ever ask a girl to dance. And so I’ll be staying here in this room. Good-bye.” And then he went over to the record player and put on the Bathburns’ favorite song again: “I Think of You.”
    Yes, I am quite good at turning cheerful suddenly, and I can also be rather bold. Winnie said my peculiar boldness always came out of nowhere just when she least expected it. Like one time in London when we were hurrying to the air-raid shelter down in the tube (the subway). We passed a small child on the street all by himself, trudging along slowly. I felt sorry for him, all alone as he was, so I rushed up to him and I grabbed his little hand and pulled him along with us to the shelter.
    Now I could feel that strange British boldness coming over me again and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I went over to Derek face-to-face and I said, “You see, you can ask a girl for a spin on the dance floor. I’ll dance with you. Pick up your left arm and prop it on my shoulder.” And I took him by the right hand. He seemed kind of surprised and suddenly we started to do a slow dance, a waltz I think it’s called, in the darkened room with “I Think of You” playing.
    It felt lovely to dance with Derek. I was thinking, for a boy with no paperwork and an assigned birthday, he was quite nice, really. And then in spite of the letters and the code and the piano and the rift, and even in spite of the war, I rather loved him just then.

Yes, the ocean in Maine was very loud and the wind was wheezy and wild, but of course, London could be much noisier on the nights when the bombers struck. I would be sleeping in my bed and then we would hear the terrible whine of the air-raid sirens warning us to take cover, to go to the tube for shelter. Sometimes it was too late and we didn’t go at all. One night during an air raid, Winnie and Danny and I stood under the staircase in our hall. We were told that the stairwell was the strongest part of the building. Danny was in his slippers. I was barefoot and my feet were cold. So under that stairwell Danny gave me his slippers. I stood there listening to the airplanes droning above us, wearing my Danny’s huge, blue, felt slippers. That night, a building down the street was bombed. It was the loudest noise I’d ever heard. We seemed to feel that building collapsing all around us. We smelled dust and smoke. The paintings on the walls in our flat shook and yet, they didn’t fall. We lost our electricity for good, but our building was safe.
    Later that night when I was in bed again, I heard Winnie and Danny talking. They talked and talked and Winnie cried. When I peeked through my door, I saw my parents sitting together, mostly in the dark except for a small candle flickering on the table. They were talking about something I couldn’t understand. It seemed important. Because of that and the bombs, they couldn’t keep me in London anymore.
    Winnie said, “There’s no other choice. We have to take her to your mother’s in Maine, darling. You know we must. There’s no other alternative.”
    “I know you’re right,” said Danny, “but I don’t want to and I don’t know how to approach Gideon after all this time. He’s so terribly upset with